[url=http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/6022]Fox Has Jumped the Shark[/url]

by Cenk Uygur

The Democrats have finally caught on. They recently cancelled a presidential debate scheduled to be on Fox News Channel. The only people who remain clueless ironically are real news organizations. The press is jeopardizing its own credibility by buying into the fiction that Fox is in the business of journalism.

Let's look at just some of the more egregious examples of Fox's idea of balanced reporting from the past. There are the countless internal memos directing their reporters and anchors on how to spin the news (please read some of these memos here). One of the most famous is one from John Moody where he directed his reporters to find stories on how insurgents are celebrating the Democratic victories in 2006.

Then there are the banners labeling Mark Foley a Democrat. And banners demonizing Democrats in the form of a question - Neil Cavuto's favorite ploy. Here's a classic from Cavuto's show:"Is the Liberal Media Helping To Fuel Terror?" And my personal favorite on Fox: "All-Out Civil War In Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?"

Please look at just some of the misleading Fox headlines collected here. It's an amazing list.

The blatant lies and obvious distortions reported by Faux News as "real news" are being revealed more and more by similar internet postings. Without the net, the American public would be even more brainwashed.

Without the net, Bush-Cheney and their neoCON buddies would be pushing for them to have a third term. I'm not saying that they won't try that yet, but we would know next to nothing about all the scandals that have oozed out of the Bush White House. Heck, without the net, they wouldn't even be known as SCANDALS if they were known at all!

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"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."Honore de Balzac

"Democrats work to help people who need help. That other party, they work for people who don't need help. That's all there is to it."~Harry S. Truman

Just when you think Bill O'Reilly could sink no lower, he shows us that he there is never "low enough."

This past week Bill found it somehow palatable to spin the sad news that Tony Snow's cancer had reemerged into a hitjob on the left. Bill must have forgotten his excoriation of Jimmy Carter for making a political comment in the midst of someone else's personal pain at Corretta Scott King's funeral or Paul Wellstone funeral organizers for "allowing a very solemn occasion deteriorate into a political rally."

Friday on the TV Factor, he and Michelle Malkin raked the Huffington Post's Roy Sekoff across the coals for actually having one of the 900 HP bloggers post an anti-Snow column that was up for eight hours. Then hit him for an attack on Snow by one of the thousands of commenters.

Thank God you don't have stuff like that happening on FreeRepublic.com or any other right wing site.

But it gets better (worser?). If using a "friend's" sickness as a political tool is not sick enough, Bill turned his weekly newspaper column on Tony Snow's illness into a partisan slam of Howard Dean and the Left.

Read more at the link.

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"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."Honore de Balzac

"Democrats work to help people who need help. That other party, they work for people who don't need help. That's all there is to it."~Harry S. Truman

Today, Fox News’s Your World with Neil Cavuto did a segment devoted to making the case that “Albert Gore is a very dangerous man.” Energy CEO Bob Murray said, “Albert Gore is the shaman of global goofiness, and we’d better not be listening to him.” He added that the “science is [still] out” on global warming.

Murray, a major GOP contributor, was one of the members of Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force.

Fox News Sinks To New Low, Repeatedly Reports Parody Story As Actual News

On Tuesday, Fox News morning show “Fox & Friends” aired at least eight segments on a purported “news” story that was actually a parody article written by a publication similar to The Onion.

The backstory: Last week in the town of Lewiston, Maine, a group of Somalian Muslim middle school students were the subject of a cruel prank when their peers placed a ham steak next to them in order to personally offend the students. School officials filed a report because the students considered the act to be a hate/bias crime.

This actual story was then spoofed by a parody site called Associated Content, which made up quotes and details, such as the school’s intention to “create an anti-ham ‘response plan.’”

Fox’s careless blunder made news in the town and “launched an immediate avalanche of angry phone calls and ugly e-mails to the school system.”

In the parody, the ham steak became a ham sandwich. Fake quotes were attributed to Superintendent Leon Levesque, Stephen Wessler of the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence, and one of the Somali students targeted in the incident. […]

Following the Fox broadcast, Levesque’s office received dozens of angry phone calls and profanity-laced e-mails, made and sent by people all over the country, who charge the school district overreacted to what they believed from news reports to be a ham sandwich tossed at a Somali student. […]

“Fox has figured out, from the calls we’ve gotten, that they’ve made a big mistake,” Wessler said.

“This is a wake-up call that the level of hate and anger, among a small population, is vibrant,” he added.

Levesque said he was bothered not only that the parody took aim at a sensitive issue in Lewiston, but also that Fox and others reported the information as fact without checking. The national media, Levesque said, sees information posted online and “uses it as gospel.”

We’ve long known Fox News’ reporting was parody, but reporting parody news is a new low.